


A Prison, a Lamp, and a Little Bottle

by ironfish



Category: Dress Up! Time Princess (Video Game)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:26:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27043459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ironfish/pseuds/ironfish
Summary: Gina agrees to become Chapur's apprentice so she can trick him with a magic spell.
Relationships: Chapur/Gina (Dress Up! Time Princess)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 46





	1. Light, You Have the Wrong Prince

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently the serpent queen in 1001 Nights is named Yamlikha so that's the name I used instead of calling her ThE SeRpEnT QuEeN every single paragraph

"Let me guess, Kahir again."

Light floats back and forth impatiently. He is effectively pacing, though at least polite enough to float instead of wearing a tread into the floor. The way he flits about makes him resemble an impatient blue bird, with Gina's simple bedroom as his cage.

Gina is holding a hand mirror and preening. She is absorbed by her own face -- mostly on everything wrong with it. The redness under her eyes, the wrong shape of the jawline. She doesn't know why, but she feels she should at least try to be pretty. She guesses it's a habit. She's thickened her lash line with black kohl and applied a sort of waxy proto-lipstick, but oh, what the 21st-century part of her would do for a little foundation and contour.

"What's so great about that guy, anyway?" Light continues, crossing his arms and making a face at her. "He's just... Mr. Perfect. Isn't that kind of boring?"

"I guess I'm just a boring girl," she answers back. Gina pinches at a single eyelash which has fallen out and stuck to her cheek, then blinks. Perhaps if she blinks, if she closes her eyes long enough, then she will open them and the face in the mirror will have turned into something better.

Nope. This is it, the whole display. She takes in a quiet breath. Her heart races, her pulse thrums, and the way her hair hangs limp and the bags under her eyes droop betray her body's need to sink into the floor and escape. She can't hide it, at least not without contour.

 _He_ might notice these things, later, but for now, Light does not. Gina's flaws and insecurities don't even exist in Light's world. "You're not boring, Gina! That's not what I meant!" Now he's been thrown off-guard; he was expecting a fight. For some reason, this makes him more angry. "It's just that we made a promise and everything, and you still spend all your time with that... prince!"

"You don't _own_ me, Light."

"I didn't say I owned you!"

"Yeah, but you're constantly harping on me about this. 'Magic lamp' this, 'Kahir' that." She does her best to aggravate him. It's important that he goes back into his lamp, so he doesn't see what she's doing or try to follow her out the door. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were jealous of him, Light."

"Jealous?!" Light squawks. "Me? The all-powerful genie, jealous of him? Get real, Gina."

She sets the mirror down on the table. "At least Kahir doesn't nag me about how much time I spend with other people."

Light's face turns red. He throws his fists down in indignation. "Y'know what? Fine. Have fun, okay. If you think Kahir is so much better than me, then I bet you won't won't miss me anyway."

Light zaps back into his lamp so suddenly the thing rattles before settling into place. _He's in one of his moods now,_ Gina says to herself, _and thank God they're so dependable._

The room is quiet.

She pauses a moment. Once it's certain he's not going to come back out, Gina tiptoes over to the cupboard closest to her bed and retrieves something wrapped in muslin from it. She opens the cloth bundle, just a bit, just to make sure the object is still inside.

To a casual observer, and at a glance, this object looks like a second magic lamp, but when she casts another glance at the first one, she's reassured of their differences, especially in craftsmanship. Hold them side by side, and the comparison dies immediately. She's hoping, though, that Chapur doesn't remember what the original looks like.

She told Light this was another meeting with Kahir. She lied.

Gina places the fake lamp in a little satchel to carry, and slings this over her shoulder.

"Goodbye, Light," she calls out, to no one, before closing the door.

The sun outside is beginning to sink.

Inside this lamp, the fake lamp, is a magic gift from the serpent called Yamlikha.

Since being gifted the golden scale, Gina has taken to visiting its owner again, every so often, and sometimes accompanying her on errands around the market when she needs to bother with _human things_. Partly this is out of some wordless gratitude, and partly it is out of loneliness.

Despite her friendship with Light and Kahir, Gina and the Serpent Queen alike are both lonely. Caught up in a magic lamp revenge plot and with two stubborn men pining for her, Yamlikha is about the only older woman she can get advice from, short of gossiping to Queen Scheherazade about her own son. And while the snake woman still bristled, initially, at the mention of young love between a girl and a prince, in her vast loneliness she has slowly grown more invested. She's become friends with these second-hand persons, Gina's life outside those cavern walls, in that strange civilization, becoming her new hypothetical, what might have been her own life if things had worked out and she had truly become mortal.

Gina has come to value her, too, as a friend. However, the Queen's particular patterns of attention to the figures in her life do cause her some annoyance, somtimes.

She asks about Chapur a lot, for example. Gina thinks the Serpent Queen might have a crush on him, maybe because they are both snakes. She laughs every time Gina brings him up, which she has been trying to do less and less, unsuccessfully. Recently she said something too that really stuck in Gina's craw. What was it again? Something like, "he says he'll kill you with his words but not with his body."

First of all, what does that even mean. Second of all, what a tremendously weird thing to say when Gina had so clearly established Chapur was the bad guy.

"What do you mean," she asked anyway.

The Queen replied -- and her smile was this golden, hollow thing, like a funeral mask, that didn't reach her eyes -- "You are a lowly servant girl with no family. He is a well-versed magician of the dark arts, under the protection of the Prime Minister, and thus there is nothing stopping him from killing you. So, why does he hesitate?" And she had to admit that was true. She has no idea what he's waiting for.

The Queen made for her a pinch of pink dust in a vial. "Here," she said, "this will solve all your problems with that little sorcerer."

"What is it?" Gina asked, accepting the gift.

"You can put it in anything, but the container must be opened by the victim in order to trigger the effect. Use something you can... trick him into messing with."

"But what does it _do?_ "

Her eyes flashed. "It'll make him... _forget_ his ill intentions towards you."

So, it's on Yamlikha's advice that she is going to the palace now, with her little fake lamp, as bait, full of magic powder, and a whole summer migration of butterflies in her stomach. The lamp she found in an old storeroom of the mansion -- Sinbad probably won't miss it. He has millions of things.

As for the excuse to visit rather than having to sneak in like she normally does, Chapur asks her to become his apprentice at the Astrology Chamber kind of a lot. She said yes this most recent time, and she remembers how his eyebrows shot up in surprise ("You're actually considering it?" "Not considering. Already have."). And because, of course, these requests of his are obviously an attempt to get closer to the lamp, and nothing more, she'll make an opportunity of his greed and give him this ersatz version when he inevitably asks for it. Then he will open it, at some point, and the powder will explode. Then Chapur will turn into a good person. Because he will be a good person, he will not be sore about it, and everything will be okay for the rest of eternity. That's about the extent to which she's thought about it, anyway, and her optimism has vaguely filled up the rest of the blueprint.

Gina hopes not to die. Yamlikha is her friend, and she trusts her friend. She plans, as she walks, to bill the snake woman for her funeral anyway.

As she approaches the guarded gates, the palace is awash in sunset. Pinks, yellows and oranges shimmer and morph against the high white towers, like jewels in a shallow pool. Because it's the end of summer, the sky is still light for a long time.

The guards at the gate recognize her these days as a friend of the Prince, and let her pass without a word, which has perhaps been the greatest blessing of their friendship. It feels cold to think such a thing, that something so trivial, and not the outright companionship, is his greatest blessing, but she does. Gina nods at these guards unnecessarily, moving past them and then forward for a while, past columns and doorways and more sets of guards who also recognize her, until she reaches the middle of the courtyard.

She stands there and realizes she has no idea where the Astrology Chamber is. That's their meeting location, and yet he gave her no instructions on how to reach it. Of course. Just to be tricky, she bets.

When she realizes this, she brings her hands to her chest and clutches the strap of her satchel self-consciously, straightening her back a bit. Without some distracted momentum carrying her from Point A to Point B, her thoughts are left to wander and to hopelessly, inevitably alight on the fact she is a stranger, and cold, very cold. Even when she has a legitimate reason to be in the palace -- and today she doesn't, she really doesn't -- Gina always feels, in its ever-narrowing walls, like she's wearing a disguise, not least of all because the man with the most power in the Full Moon Kingdom right now seems to think of commoners like Gina as a form of vermin. Because of this, she imagines, the moment her disguise is not good enough, the ice bridge will snap, and she will go tumbling into the abyss: street rat, guttersnipe, exposed, swept away, murdered. "Ah, but wait--" Kahir will be minutes too late.

Sometimes, she wishes she were more like Queen Scheherazade, that effortlessly graceful and quiet and serene woman, with her huge green glass marble eyes. That's a nice racket if you can manage it, but Gina is too proud for folded hands and glass eyes; she wears her slum manners like a coat of red paint because she can't do anything else. She gets in fights with the either the prince or his Royal Astrologer almost constantly.

So she will try to at least be her particular brand of disheveled in the manner of a lost puppy (a street puppy, but a lost one all the same, pitiable). Hopefully this will encourage the nobles to view her as so far inferior to them that she is a downright basket case -- a basket case is the best she can do -- and then view offering her assistance as an act of _noblesse oblige_. There is a chance, then, that they might be even charitable enough to get her out of this obligation entirely, maybe offer to kill Chapur, and that awful Prime Minister, maybe give her some money, because she could use a little money.

Ah, no, not anymore, she remembers, not since her slum was destroyed and Sinbad took them all in. Angling for some coin is just an inescapable impulse, the same as her tendency to sneak food from banquets back to her room and then feel too afraid to eat it. Once you starve once you never really stop.

No, she doesn't want for money, not anymore, and she supposes she doesn't want to kill Chapur, either. (The Prime Minister, though. Hmm.) Gina just doesn't want to do this alone. Tricking him, getting him angry, and not just in that usual teasing way, actually terrifies her. In the most hopeful reflection of her mind's silver eye, Kahir finishes his supper, strolls across the courtyard to return to his study, because he never has anything, really, to do that isn't just leisurely research, catches sight of her, and they will laugh, and smile, catch up, and she'll tell him she's here to be maybe killed by the Royal Astrologer, and they will come up with a plan, like they always do, to protect the magic lamp, because he always seems to have the right clearance and a plan for everything.

Maybe that's why she hates him so much, she realizes. Kahir holds on to the perfect solutions and happy endings, and only doles them out to the lesser folks. like her, on a whim. He seems like he'd be surprised to learn other people are often unhappy. He might even drop his pen.

She gives him a chance, though, a chance for his whims to land on her today. She does this for what she imagines to be five minutes. Nobody comes.

The evening chill becomes a lot more noticeable, then. In the last visible dregs of the setting sun, which was, until just moments ago, her sole companion in this place, the warmth in the air has already vanished. What is left behind is just its spirit.

Then she must move forward with her own plan. She doesn't have to -- she could turn around and walk right out the way she came, but the possibility, however small, of ending this charade with Chapur _without_ having to hand over the lamp is just too tempting not to consider. She doesn't have the real one with her, anyway ,so the worst that could happen is that he kills her, and he wouldn't do that, because of that thing Yamlikha said with his body.

(Except that he already did.)

(No, that didn't happen in this timeline. Just forget about it.)

Her mind can't wander. She has to move now, before the sun fully sets and the buildings become dark and identical. Gina scans the courtyard's offerings and counts the ones she knows: the royal library, Kahir's study, the banquet hall. Notably absent is any building with a comically large telescope protruding out of it, or something similar to announce "this is where astrology takes place."

She supposes she could ask, but she hates them, she really does. She hates them all. She understands the French Revolution from the other perspective much better now. Excepting Queen Scheherazade, who wouldn't hurt anybody, these people, in their walls, and with their fancy clothes and fine hair, are very easy to hate.

She wanders to a sort of unassuming building she doesn't recognize. Only one guard is posted at the door, and it's nice, but not quite as big or as grand as the other buildings, suggesting it might be a place where someone only almost royal would be.

Gina approaches the guard. "Is this the Astrology Chamber?" she asks, manners be damned. This man did not come to her rescue those minutes earlier when she was in visible distress. How he must have been watching her stand there, shivering stupidly. The thought makes her want to choke, though she doesn't know if that's out of shame or anger.

"It is, my lady," this awful guard responds, "but maids are not allowed to enter."

"Um." She clears her throat. "I'm not a maid. The Royal Astrologer asked me here." _And I bet he'll kick your ass for making me stand out in the cold,_ she adds mentally, except he wouldn't. Why would he?

The guard looks at her. "Oh. May I ask your name, miss?"

"Gina."

He nods, though it's clear from his expression that he's still uncertain. "Of course. My apologies. Just a moment." The man must have imagined some foreign dignitary, not the small, pouting street urchin who has instead approached this gilded place, much too fine for her, and asked outright for entry, like she deserves it. He turns and faces the door to Chapur's chamber but does not enter to summon him. Instead he knocks three times, and waits.

Gina stares.

"He prefers to come to the door," the guard clarifies. "He's very private."

After a moment, the man seems certain this event will eventually take place. His finely tuned ears must have heard the shuffling of royal astrologer feet and decided his work in arranging the meeting was done.

To Gina, it remains an empty, silent door that perhaps no one will ever answer. She might stare at it for forty years, and it would stare back at her, for forty years, unchanging.

The guard faces forward, becoming a statue. That is all she will ever know of him. Fine. She doesn't want to learn anymore; he's just one of a faceless many, but he is, she now realizes -- and the realization combs over her like the unpleasant rake of a camel's teeth -- now only present with her in the physical sense. Were Chapur to simply open the door, lift up his staff, and begin beating her to death wordlessly, this other man would simply stand there, giving no reaction until he was so ordered, and even then would probably take Chapur's side on the whole thing. The two of them would be pardoned for it, the roll in the royal carpet sufficiently smoothed, and Chapur would return to his chambers, and this man resume his work as a statue. She decides immediately that it is anger and not shame that she feels. She wants to smash them all, though Chapur, for what it's worth, seems to also think that this dynasty is a joke, even while he is a part of it.

Her thoughts are interrupted by the sound of the door creaking open. Gina jolts in surprise like a bolt of lightning.

It seems like the door has been answered by a ghost. In the gloam of the chamber, Chapur is nearly invisible. She can only make out his faint silhouette and those two beady eyes of his snake staff twinkling. Twinkling. They reflect a light that does not exist.

Gina and her new mentor look at each other in silence.

"You're early," he has decided.

Though she is still nervous, in the presence of the dark sorcerer, Gina finds it easier to act assertive. It hides the way her hackles rise around him whenever he acts serious. "You said to come at night," she replies. "It's technically night now. And I _obviously_ chose a time when there would be the most witnesses."

(And yet there is only one.)

"Ah, my apologies. I didn't realize the request would make you uncomfortable. I was under the impression it was your preference to sneak around in the dark." He knows she sometimes follows him after dark -- but it's only to make sure he's not up to evil things. Surely he must know that, too.

With that stupid smirk likely plastered on his face in its perfect diagonal, the sorcerer retreats into his darkness, gesturing with one hand for her to follow.

She glances at the guard first, who is still entirely removed from the situation and remains stone-still. He likely would not even report this occurrence, were something to go wrong and Kahir to come desperately looking for her. It would not even cross his mind as worthy of being mentioned.

Before walking inside, she sticks out her tongue at the guard, sideways, just a little bit.

But the moment Chapur disappeared, the wall behind these small acts of defiance of hers has grown flimsier, because, now that she has gotten so close to him and remembered his face, his expression, Gina realizes she really doesn't know if she will make it out alive.


	2. Chapur, You Have the Wrong Lamp

The change as she enters his doorway is palpable. There's a muddled incense smell, and it's warmer, and the room is dark, very dark. Gina has to wait for her eyes to adjust. It's a sizable but oppressive space, lined with incense and fabric and about a thousand books. It feels like the inside of a treasure chest. She does not want to be in a treasure chest with Chapur. She does not like treasures at all, decidedly. The windows have been rejected for their original purpose and instead covered by thick curtains. Only a few oil lamps offer their light, creating just enough orange glow for her to make out the room's contents -- some star charts and astrolabes, various shelves and countertops, and a set of more delicate curtains framing the alcove where his bed is.

He sleeps here. How private. If she enters through one of the windows, she could come back some other time and kill him, Gina thinks -- casually, as though the most difficult part of that would be finding a way in.

The leftover racks of empty earthenware, tongs, and other chemical tools confirm her suspicion that the Astrology Chamber was not installed alongside the former Alchemy Lab but rather on top of it, and likely in a hurry. One night Awad must have simply been awoken by the Prime Minister's men and tossed out into the cold, and Chapur, unfazed by the idea of moving in to a recent crime scene, must have simply set the upset containers back into their places, swept the floor, and plastered the walls with a new set of instructional charts more suited to his tastes. The chemical burners and other expensive equipment subsidized by the royal coffers, once beloved, were discarded, supplanted by one plain brass censer.

The smell is woody and earthen, the darkness sweltering. This is the room of someone who wants to be dead.

"You live like a bat," Gina says, dismayed.

"You have no experience in the magical arts, do you?" The sorcerer asks as he rummages in one of the bookshelves, atop of which, she notices, rests a display stand for a scimitar with a dark, striped handle. "What sort of spells would you like to learn?"

"Oh. I get to pick?"

"You get to pick and then I get to decide whether you're worthy of learning it. Of course," -- and here he turns to face her with a book in his hand -- "we'll need to cover the foundations before getting to anything _really_ interesting. But let's set a goal. What would you like?"

Any magic she wants, huh? Gina thinks about what she would like to learn. There's a good chance they won't have a second meeting, but it's nice to dream all the same. She could turn invisible or shoot fire out of her hands, though Yamlikha wouldn't like that very much, and probably wouldn't let her come back if she ever found out about it. "I guess I want to learn time spells," Gina shrugs, the first thing she could think of.

Chapur considers this for a moment.

"Ah," he he says, "then you and I are alike."

Gina assumed this so-called apprenticeship would entail being forced to give him the lamp and then maybe occasionally having to fetch him things. He explains to her that it does, but also that his apprentice must learn at least _some_ magic theory in order to fetch him things better. He gives her the book he was holding to take home and study -- something she absolutely will not do, though she nods and accepts it anyway -- and then invites her to sit while he goes over the basics.

Gina sits. She takes the satchel off her shoulder and sets it on the floor beside her. Chapur does not sit. Chapur holds his staff and lectures down at her like she is a tiny princess.

It turns out magic comes in many kinds: fire magic, water magic, wind magic, fortune magic, earth magic, and all sorts of dark magic, which includes the whole space-time deal. The Royal Astrologer speaks on each of them at length. He's very well-versed in this, which means the lesson goes on forever, much to her chagrin. Gina tries her best to pay attention at first, but it soon becomes clear the magic of this universe is less wands-and-whimsy type and more a matter of formulas and dead languages and discipline, so her interest slowly drifts away from the subject matter and more onto the person explaining it.

Look at how weird he is just talking to her. He hasn't even tried to kill her yet. In fact, Chapur's going through the motions of an apprenticeship lesson so seriously that for a second she almost believes it. Still, it's obviously just to get the lamp. It's all a ploy. He could probably go on like this indefinitely, acting the part of the diligent instructor with eternal patience, yet eternally loyal to his secret motive of stealing it from her. It's good Gina is rash enough to do this now, on day one, instead of trying to thoroughly earn his trust over weeks, months, years. Their shared path arcs inevitably towards a betrayal, and though Gina's a lousy actor, Chapur is a good enough one that, if she were to let this go on any longer than a moment, that betrayal would probably hurt.

But why? They hardly know each other. It's just, she supposes, that too great a part of her wants to believe his feigned interest in her as a student is actually true. She would like to live in a world where she is liked by Chapur; he seems impressive, and dangerous, and Gina knows the best way to deal with someone dangerous is to make sure you are liked. She wants a version of this story where there is no magic lamp, and Light is some local friend, and Kahir minds his own business, and Awad isn't thrown out of the palace, and Chapur is just a nice astrologer who eventually admits to a grudging respect for her. Maybe they would all work together to stop the Prime Minister. Just something, anything. She wants a story where she doesn't feel like something is missing.

But no. Instead he chooses to be mysterious and evil. She doesn't even know what the point of it is -- she supposes he wants to get the lamp and rise to power, but that makes no sense anyway; he's already playing one side of an impending royal coup. With his magic, he could arrange to have most of the key players killed in the resulting chaos, magic lamp be damned, and then it's just a matter of filling in the power vacuum. Any real royal lineage would be gone, and Chapur has an evil scepter and that nice purple turban; no one would even question it if he said he was the rightful heir to the throne. Depose the king, his brother and son, ascend to power and scoop up pretty little Scheherazade as his wife--

 _No_ , says all her insides at once. One of them even seems to hiss. She's not sure which organ that is. It feels like it's between her heart and her stomach.

Okay, maybe he doesn't marry Scheherazade, her mind allows. Let's have the queen run back to her Western Provinces, or maybe toss her into the body count. It doesn't matter, since Chapur doesn't want any of this anyway. He just wants to take the lamp from her to be evil, nothing more.

Gina tries to scrutinize his face for answers as to why someone with so much potential to be _anything_ might settle on just being pointlessly evil. Maybe faces are like palms, and there are lines that say things like "unrequited love" and wrinkles for ethics-altering childhood traumas.

She looks. There's nothing on his face, no unusual lines. Just a serious set of eyebrows which mostly stay in place -- no nonsense here -- and his dark brown eyes, which don't; they sort of shift, like he can't quite stare at her directly for more than a second, and has to look off to the side, over her right shoulder, where it is more safe. The nearby lamp lights enough of him to show the shadows beneath his eyes, too, and that unnatural rosiness of his lips, which are framed by a well-trimmed cropping of facial hair. She comes to no conclusions about this man except that he is pleasant to look at, not that she gets to do it often.

The last time she was really able to look at Chapur is when he pinned her to that wall -- _that_ wall, demonstrative pronoun -- which doesn't count, because she has no idea how much of that memory is real and how much fabricated. She adds new embellishments every time she revisits it, which she occasionally does. Often does. _Often_ does, because she still needs to untangle the feelings it puts in her stomach, to separate the anger and fear wires in that ticking time bomb from all the other ones, but she's not sure what kind the other ones even are. They seem somewhat nicer, though she knows better than to call them any definitive positive thing, or even a permissive neutral like "intrigue." Perhaps, she'll admit, there is a shade of attraction there, but only a shade, and she refuses to give the attraction a name because giving it a name makes it realer than it should ever be, and it just--

And it just--

And it just occurs to her what Yamlikha meant.

Yamlikha thinks she likes him.

She must have been careless when she'd described what had happened, must have allowed some of those unruly wires to slip in, there all exposed. Yamlikha is not necessarily wrong, but she's definitely _wrong_ , because Chapur does not deserve for her to be right. He threw Gina off a cliff for God's sake. There is no "hey how are you" after you throw someone off a cliff. That's it. You're done. It does not matter if you're incredibly handsome--

"Gina."

Someone yanks her little brain back by its dog leash, the way names often are. Gina looks at him, for real this time, and not just in a spacing out sort of way where her imagination fills in the lines. Chapur is staring at her, and has gone quiet. He seems to be expecting a response.

"Yeah, what?" she asks.

"I asked you a question." He smirks. Boy, his smile is always sideways like that. If not those "childhood trauma" laugh lines, he's at least going to get wrinkles up his mouth on one side when he ages, like a half-finished pumpkin.

A beat passes before Gina remembers to recover from this. "Right, and... it was a very good question, which is why I'm still thinking about it. Thank you for asking."

Chapur seems unconvinced. The only sound in the room once she finishes is her heart hammering in her chest. "Little girl," he says at last, drily, "if you cannot be bothered to sit through even the most basic explanation of magic, then you are useless to me."

He's taking this so seriously. She really just expected him to order her around and make some snide comments about the magic lamp, not that she had pictured how this would play out in detail -- every time she tried that, it became a recreation of the wall scene and she'd had to stop -- but Chapur dropping any pretense as soon as she walked through the door and then making a pass for the lamp was just the most likely scenario, full stop. The fact that he's _mad_ she's not playing along with this, at his level, annoys her a little bit, and because she's impatient, and angry, and doesn't want to sit here in his sensuous, scented, smoke-filled, seductive room thinking about his stupid handsome face any longer, she snaps back, "Oh come on! What is even the point? We both know what this is really about."

She looks at him expectantly, but Chapur doesn't respond, so she hoists the satchel onto her lap and pulls out her cloth bundle. Perhaps revealing the treasure he thinks he's after will jog his memory. "This whole apprentice thing is just one of your ploys to get to the lamp, isn't it?" She drops the satchel, and the cloth, onto the floor.

The sorcerer still doesn't answer. Gina stands up and walks towards him, presenting the lamp, like he just doesn't get it. "Well, lucky you. I'm tired of playing these stupid games over it. Here, take it. It's yours."

Chapur stares at her, very surprised, though his expression leans away from pure astonishment and more into a confused sneer. He doesn't even accept the lamp right away. "So that's what you think this is," he says.

Gina rolls her eyes. Why is he still playing her? "Not 'what I think,'" she snaps. "That's the actual truth. Can you just drop it and respect my intelligence a little bit?"

"I haven't mentioned the lamp to you once this evening."

"W-Well..." Gina considers this for a moment, but screw him, honestly. He's just lying. She thrusts it towards him again, the exclamation mark on her unfinished sentence. "Well I bet you were _thinking_ about it!"

The sorcerer hesitates. He must know this is a trap. It's clumsy, sudden, and obvious, but his greed overcomes him. He reaches for it.

Gina flinches. "I-- just don't hurt the genie inside, okay? He's my friend." She has no idea where this comes from, all of the sudden. If he falls for the fake lamp it's not even relevant, but maybe, if this doesn't work, and Chapur kills her and manages to grab the real one, some part of her thinks to make this plea ahead of time, because it is a sincere one; Light is important to her, and Chapur likely plans to exploit him. She takes a breath and steels her nerves enough to hand it to him for real this time.

Chapur finally manages, by this point, to recalibrate, and settles back into his comfortable role of an evil aggressor. He smiles at her as though this whole exchange was his idea and says, "of course." "Of course" is not a promise or a truce.

He lets go of the serpent staff, which stands upright on its own, when not being held. Like it's alive. Like it's yet another immobile witness to this exchange between the girl and the sorcerer.

The lamp is soon his, and the trap has been set.

In her eagerness to get out the door before he maybe sets the powder off, Gina forgets she's supposed to appear calm and nonchalant. "Okay, then. That's settled," she says, fidgeting with her now empty hands. "I guess I should be leaving."

He turns the lamp about in his hands, inspecting it from all sides, though there's not much light for it to catch. "I'm pleased you've come to your senses about the lamp, Gina," Chapur replies without looking up. He's "pleased," though the usual arrogant lilt is absent from his voice, and still he doesn't seem entirely happy. Does he know? He must know.

Gina continues shuffling backwards towards the door.

"...Though I am disappointed you have no real interest in being my apprentice. I do think you have real potential for magic."

"Well... maybe someday. Who knows, right?" She swallows. He's rubbing it with his fingers now; she has no time before the lamp does nothing and he figures out it's a fake.

"No," he says.

Chapur's thumb moves to the lid.

 _Too late too late too late,_ Gina panics, but for some reason her legs won't move. They only shake.

The world goes silent.

"I'm afraid there won't be a 'someday.' Not now, when I have this."

And then the lamp explodes.


End file.
